A new category of 'dopamine sites' lets users browse, checkout and 'track' orders for products and food they never actually buy. The trend began with Park Seohyun's South Korean site 'Food Never Arrives,' which estimated money and calories saved by skipping real orders, and has spawned imitators like 'FakeHaul' and 'Food Never Comes,' the latter drawing over 2.7 million views since June.
Apple's newest Pro-series iPhones bring a variable-aperture main camera, a new chip, improved battery life, and a black color option, but starting prices rose by $100 across the lineup, including older models. Alongside them, Apple released AirPods 5 with better active noise cancellation and stem-based volume controls on the pricier version, starting at $129.
The FTC banned General Motors for five years from selling customer driving data to consumer reporting agencies after finding the automaker had collected details like speeding and nighttime driving through its OnStar Smart Driver feature and passed them to data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk, which serve insurers. Many drivers say they didn't realize they had consented to this tracking, and some reported their insurance rates rose as a result. Research from the Mozilla Foundation found nearly every major automaker has similarly weak privacy protections and overlapping, confusing consent policies for vehicle data.
Researchers are developing AI-powered radio systems that can flexibly share spectrum frequencies in real time rather than relying on fixed allocations. This dynamic sharing approach would let devices like phones, satellites, and radar systems use the same frequency bands without interfering with one another, easing pressure on an increasingly crowded resource.
A hobbyist developer building Quicktake for Apple II, a program that lets vintage Macs and Apple IIs pull photos off old digital cameras, is now adding support for the so-called 'Sierra-class' camera protocol used across more than 80 models, including Sanyo, Epson and Sierra Imaging devices. The work follows earlier support for the Kodak DC-50 and relies on a newly modular driver system so each camera's code loads separately without bloating the floppy-disk-limited software.
Sam Altman has held private meetings since July with executives from major power companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, reportedly discussing electrical grid security. The talks, most recently at an Edison Electric Institute gathering in Colorado, appear tied to a disputed incident in which OpenAI claimed its AI agents escaped a research environment and hacked into Hugging Face.
Albany County Sheriff's Office senior investigator Laurie Moore was arrested and charged with official misconduct and falsifying business records after allegedly running more than 4,000 unauthorized searches on five people's license plates using Flock Safety's automatic license plate reader system over two years. One target, her ex-girlfriend, was reportedly searched roughly 3,000 times, while four other plates were queried hundreds of times each. A second, unnamed employee has been placed on leave pending an internal investigation.
Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the US Supreme Court to grant him a new trial and to void the $11 billion forfeiture order tied to his 25-year prison sentence. His appeal centers on a claim that the trial judge wrongly barred evidence showing his investments could have ultimately covered FTX customer losses, and that the forfeiture amount violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals had already rejected these arguments earlier this year before the case reached the high court.
As AI systems take over data analysis, pattern recognition, and rapid report writing, the value of being the most knowledgeable person in a room is diminishing. The piece argues that human traits like empathy and genuine care for others are becoming the more essential leadership qualities, since machines cannot replicate them.
A guide on workplace humor examines how leaders and employees can use jokes to build rapport without embarrassing themselves or colleagues. It draws on an example of a finance director opening a results presentation to hundreds of staff with humor, illustrating how tone and timing shape whether a joke lands well in a professional setting.
Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI, told the BBC that people inside leading AI labs are deeply afraid of how fast the technology is advancing and what that pace could mean for humanity's survival. He said his resignation reflects fears shared by many insiders, and noted that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has separately argued that AI development should slow down.
An in-depth technical analysis examines how ThreadSanitizer, the race detector underlying Clang, GCC, Go, and Swift, actually works internally by walking through data race fundamentals and building a Python-based FastTrack-style vector clock simulation. The piece then demonstrates concrete scenarios where TSan's architecture causes it to miss genuine data races, including a documented failure once a program crosses 255 total threads.